Integrated digital marketing is an ever-changing field. Our field is competitive, and technology, competitors, and a kaleidoscope of tactics keep us all on our toes. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. “Learn and Teach” is one of Pure Visibility’s core values, and someone who wants to work on our team without a love of learning will not fit nor will that individual succeed.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading recently, including books on mobile content strategy, and yet Thinking, Fast and Slow (Amazon affiliate link)
The book’s unifying theme is exploring how we think. Essentially our minds have two systems – one which operates automatically and unfiltered, for the other we allocate focus to more complicated thinking tasks. The first might be broadly called intuition or even innate prejudice and the second we identify as our reasoning self. Yet they are interconnected and inseparable, relying on the second system for most decision-making would be tedious and take too long, so basically we are not as reasonable as we imagine ourselves to be.
Shredded, the inverse of legibility.
So applying this insight in the chapter on “Cognitive Ease” Kahneman writes “how to write a persuasive message” in which there is really one recommendation that takes many actionable forms. That recommendation is Maximize Legibility. It’s forms include:
- design for readability (if the message will be read),
- promote audibility of your message (if in a spoken or recorded setting),
- “keep it simple…”,
- make it easy to remember (think of the mnemonics you used to cram for exams – make it rhyme, for example), and lastly (most surprising to me)
- make sure your words are easy for your audience to pronounce!
Yes, it makes common sense, yet common sense isn’t always applied. The concepts in this chapter and throughout the book are a great refresher, and sometimes surprising, and little tidbits like these would make a great checklist to review before sending that client email, drafting that paid search ad, and/or revising that blog post.
Let’s make acquiring this book an easy decision for you:
- Named one of the best books of 2011 by many sources, including the New York Times Book Review,
- Written by a Nobel Laureate, and
- Costs less than a grande latte at your favorite coffee place ($2.99 for the Kindle edition – Amazon affiliate link).
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